Are Fondant Fancies a bunch of scammers?

The best newsreader software I’ve come across so far is Shrook, produced by the wonderfully-named Fondant Fancies. So once I’d given it a whirl, I decided to buy it, online via SWREG. The only problem is that a week later, I still haven’t got an unlock code. And they haven’t replied to my emails chasing them. And SWREG don’t have any kind of contact details listed on their site.

So, is this a) a cockup; or b) a scam?

I hate buying houses

Or rather, I hate buying houses from people who change their mind about selling to you after disappearing to Tenerife for a fortnight. Bugger. Back to square one again…

Not much more I can add to this

Bloggerheads says goodbye politically
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Declan McCullach doesn’t like Europe

Says Declan McCullagh, “One unsung benefit of the Internet is how beautifully it illustrates why the technology climate in the United States is superior to the one in Europe.”

And then he goes on to point out that it’s not just the internet climate - why, we Europeans censor the internet, start fewer companies, pay more taxes, are more unemployed and are nasty to big fluffy friendly companies like Microsoft.

On the other hand, we don’t tend to invade countries on the basis of bollocks, suspend habeus corpus and torture our citizens, or “elect” moronic half-wit draft-dodging fascist miserable failures to be President.

(Although in the interests of being fair and balanced it should be pointed out that the UK has done all of these things, but we’ll be telling Tony Bliar what we think about this in a year or so. On paper ballots.)

Rant over.

Saving the day, mobile-style

There must be some immutable law of physics that states that hardware only fails when it’s needed. This morning was one long panic caused by a failing wifi base station and a dodgy Cat 5 lead and a ropey Apache server; which meant that the only way I had of getting one of our websites back up was a Pocket PC and a Bluetooth phone.

And amazingly, it worked. The phone is a rather elderly Ericsson T39m, and the handheld a Dell Axim X3i. The neat bits are GPRS Manager, which takes all the hassle fun out of getting said T39m to talk to said Axim; and PocketPuTTY.

So the resolution went something like this: start up Bluetooth on the phone, then get GPRS Manager to connect to robbing bastards O2’s GPRS service. Use PocketPuTTY to bring up an SSH connection to the flakey server, and thirty seconds and a quick apachectl start later, all was well once more.

Ok, it’s hardly ground-breaking stuff; but the point it it worked, and what’s more, it worked under duress. Which hardly ever happens; there’s always something that goes wrong, and doubly-so when it involves phones and GPRS and things needing to happen ten minutes ago.

Belkin ADSL Modem with Built-In Wireless Router F5D7630

I’d been happily using a Belkin 802.11g WAP / router / switch for just under a year when this morning it decided that it was nearly out of warranty, and blew up. Not literally, but all it could manage was flashing a rather hypnotic pattern with its LEDs, and nothing in the way of 802.11g.

So it was off to PC World with a credit card, the alternative being three or four days with a 40-foot Cat 5 lead string across the apartment, and how long would it have been before that got tripped over? £89 later, I was the proud owner of a Belkin ADSL Modem with Built-In Wireless Router, which is almost as snappy a product name as F5D7630. Belkin really do need to sort their product nomenclature out - I mean, stop well short of calling them the Hokey Cokey 2000 series, but you really can do better than the ADSLMWBIWR. The thinking behind a combined modem/router/WAP box was that it means I can finally retire the rather elderly Windoze box which does pretty much nothing except run a USB ADSL modem.

And I have to report that it’s working rather well. Installation took all of two minutes - it’s a web-based interface that pops up on 192.168.2.1, so once you’ve picked up a DHCP address you’re away and configuring. Plusnet connected first time, the WEP configuration was painless and there’s a reasonably decent firewall built in, which has the option of poking ports through, as well as a DMZ option (which I must admit surprised me - I wasn’t expecting anything quite as sophisticated in a box that cost less than £100). Coverage seems more than adequate, extending a good 100 feet or so into the park (don’t get any ideas, I’ve got WEP and MAC filtering enabled), and it talks quite happily to an Airport Extreme-fitted Powerbook and a no-name clone 802.11g PC card.

About all I can say in criticism is that’s it’s not particularly pretty - I doubt there was a designer involved, and if there was they certainly didn’t serve their time at Apple; and it runs a bit warm.

I thought these went out (or down) with Boo

An inflatable meeting room. Every tech start-up should have one.

Things can only get smaller

What do you do if your main product isn’t selling terribly well these days (principally because the content’s naff and available for free on P2P)? Simple - make it smaller.

Updating PHP on a virtual Debian host - a guide for simpletons

Fantastic though the Bytemark virtual hosts are, the pre-installed version of PHP is a little antiquated for my needs, so I needed to upgrade it to the latest 4.3.7 version. The only problem is that the vast majority of ‘how to upgrade PHP on Apache for simpletons’ guides are written for Redhat, so I needed to figure it out on my own.

Here’s the process:

1. Add deb http://packages.dotdeb.org ./ to the /etc/apt/sources.list file
2. Issue an apt-get upgrade command to drag down the new packages
3. Issue an apt-get install php4 command to run the upgrade
4. Make whatever tweaks are needed to httpd.conf
5. Enjoy!

No doubt there’s quicker and cleaner and geekier ways of doing all this, but hey, it worked for me…

!sportsfan

For someone who’s not really that interested in football, and even less interested in tennis, it’s that most wonderful time of year again. Mrs Timzilla is currently dispensing advice to Sven-Goran Eriksson at high volume, so I think a little retail therapy courtesy of iTunes is called for…